In the intricate world of eCommerce, you would think that putting a price tag on your products would be one of the simpler tasks you’d have to perform. While it can be as simple as picking a number and sticking with that, you’re not going to be as high-converting or effective as you could be.

Below are 5 simple pricing strategies
to implement in your store to help you close more sales and make
happier customers.

Lose a Dollar or Penny to Gain a Sale

You’ve probably seen it thousands of
times – $4.99, $999, and other variations of prices that are one
figure below a round number. This pricing strategy has been used for
decades, but why does it work so well? After all, it’s just a penny
or dollar off!

When you price just below a larger
figure (particularly one with an extra digit, such as 999 versus
1000), you’re making the price seem lower than it actually is.
$1000 is not much different from $999, but because
we read from left to right, we put more emphasis on the first number
in the price. This means customers are more likely to
subconsciously interpret it in the hundreds rather than a thousand,
making the deal better in their minds. This is also true when it
comes to $899 versus $900 – 8 is less than 9, so it seems like a
much better deal at a glance.

Provide Discounts for Bulk or Bundles

Whether you’re selling food,
collectibles, or anything in between, people are always looking for
discounts when they buy more of something. People may want to try a
few flavors of food, get the full set of collectibles, or buy a
family set of camping gear, but they don’t want to pay the full
price for all of them separately. This is where a well-crafted deal
comes in – providing discounts for larger quantities or bundling
commonly bought items together at a lower price.

As long as you have good margins on
your products, it almost always pays to try to sell as many products
as possible – even at a discount. While you may lose a few % off of
your profit margins, adding the additional sales from multiple
purchases or additional products (bought as part of a bundle) will
provide you with more profit than you would have had otherwise – a
net win for you, and a better deal for your customers.

When it comes to bundling, Handsome
Checkout helps make it easy to create custom funnels for any
products in your store. Offer upsells, bundle similar products, and
provide order bumps at checkout to help them earn discounts – and
more sales for you.

Use Sales Effectively

Everyone loves to feel like they’re
getting a deal, and sales are a simple but effective way to instill a
fear of missing out (FOMO) into your customers to help drive a
purchase. While you can’t leave sale prices up constantly, a
well-timed promotion can be a great way to drum up more sales or get
rid of extra inventory.

If your prices are constantly lowered,
you risk competition price-matching you, effectively nullifying your
advantage and requiring you to lower your margins even further if you
want to stand out again. Meanwhile, a temporary sale is less
threatening to competition and helps motivate buyers to make a
purchase before the sale runs out.

Price Up or Down from Competition

Competition in your market can be
incredibly frustrating to deal with. Just like you, they’re trying
to maximize their profits and outsell the competition, so they’re
offering promotions and changing prices frequently. Since you’re
competing directly with your competition, you need to be mindful of
what they’re charging – and make a decision about how you want to
respond to it. There are 2 ways of thinking when it comes to pricing
– provide value or demonstrate quality.

The more popular school of thought is
to price yourself lower than your competition when possible.
Obviously, customers almost always want the lowest price, so being
cheaper than your competition is a simple way to try to win them
over. However, this can be a slippery slope when you and your
competition are actively undercutting each other’s prices. You may
reach the point where you’re cutting into your profit margins too
much to be worthwhile, so be sure not to go too much lower just for
the sake of competition.

A less popular pricing strategy is to
price more than your competition purposely, aiming to demonstrate a
more deluxe or luxurious offer than the competition. While more money
doesn’t always mean better (so exact product duplicates may not be
ideal for this strategy), if you’re selling a product that is your
own creation or not very popular, consider pricing it up to appeal to
a luxurious crowd.

Absorb Shipping Cost into Price

If there’s one thing that’s for
certain, it’s that online shoppers HATE paying for shipping. While
there’s no confirmed sole reason for the benefits of free shipping,
it is believed that customers only expect to pay what is listed in
your store’s catalogue. This means that the additional charge from
shipping completely changes the perceived value of the product,
potentially costing you the sale. And with 36%
of people abandoning their carts because of expensive delivery
charges, it doesn’t pay to charge shipping.

Instead, consider offering free
shipping, but include your expected shipping costs in the retail
price of the product. While this will raise your prices, the customer
will know exactly what to expect when they get to checkout, so they
won’t feel slighted by the extra charge.

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In 2009 I started contributing to Wordpress and couple years later built my first WooCommerce store. And now I am helping WooCommerce storeowners all over the world make more money with their stores. Wordpress Problem Solving Expert, founder of BogdanFix.